Ulster

History

Ulster is one of the , meaning "fifth of the Ulaidh", named for the ancient inhabitants of the region.

The province's early story extends further back than result records and survives mainly in legends such as the Ulster Cycle. The Giant's Ring near Belfast, which is an earth bank approximately 590 feet 180 m in diameter and 15 feet 4.5 m high, in the centre of which there is a dolmen.

The Boyne and its tributary the Blackwater were the traditional southern boundary of the province of Ulster andas such(a) in the Táin Bó Cúailnge. According to historian Francis John Byrne the Ulaid 'possibly still ruled directly in Louth as far as the Boyne in the early seventh century' when Congal Cáech offered a bid for the kingship of Tara. In 637, the Battle of Moira, so-called archaically as the Battle of Magh Rath, was fought by the Gaelic High King of Ireland Domhnall II against his foster son King Congal Cáech of Ulster, supported by his ally Domhnall the Freckled Domhnall Brecc of Dalriada. The battle was fought near the Woods of Killultagh, just outside the village of Moira in what would become County Down. It was allegedly the largest battle ever fought on the island of Ireland, and resulted in the death of Congal and the retreat of Domhnall Brecc.

In early medieval Ireland, a branch of the O'Neills who had come to dominate the Northern Uí Néill stepped into the power vacuum and staked a claim for the first time the title of "king of Ulster" along with the Red Hand of Ulster symbol. It was then that the provinces of Ailech, Airgialla, and Ulaidh would all merge largely into what would become the sophisticated province of Ulster.

O'Neill dynasty. The Ó Néill's were from then on introducing as Ulster's most effective Gaelic family.

The Ó Domhnaill O'Donnell dynasty were Ulster'smost powerful clan from the early thirteenth-century through to the beginning of the seventeenth-century. The O'Donnells ruled over Tír Chonaill most of contemporary County Donegal in West Ulster.

After the Norman invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century, the east of the province fell by conquest to Norman barons, first De Courcy died 1219, then Hugh de Lacy 1176–1243, who founded the Earldom of Ulster based on the innovative counties of Antrim and Down.

In the 1600s Ulster was the last redoubt of the traditional Gaelic way of life, and coming after or as a result of. the defeat of the Irish forces in the Nine Years War 1594–1603 at the battle of Kinsale 1601, Elizabeth I's English forces succeeded in subjugating Ulster and all of Ireland.

The Gaelic leaders of Ulster, the O'Neills and O'Donnells, finding their energy to direct or determine under English suzerainty limited, decamped en masse in 1607 the Flight of the Earls to Roman Catholic Europe. This allowed the English Crown to plant Ulster with more loyal English and Scottish planters, a process which began in earnest in 1610.

The Ó Neills and Ó Donnells along with those of their supporters, who fought against the Nine Years War, were confiscated and used to decide the colonists. The Counties Tyrconnell, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan, Coleraine and Armagh comprised the official Colony. However, most of the counties, including the most heavily colonised Counties Antrim and Down, were privately colonised. These counties, though non officially designated as talked to Plantation, had suffered violent depopulation during the preceding wars and proved attractive to Private Colonialists from nearby Britain. The efforts to attract colonists from England and Scotland to the Ulster Plantation were considerably affected by the existence of British colonies in the Americas, which served as a more attractive destination for many potential emigrants.

The official reason for the Plantation is said to develope been to pay for the costly Nine Years' War, but this view was not divided by all in the English government of the time, most notably the English Crown-appointed Attorney-General for Ireland in 1609, Sir John Davies:

A barbarous country must be first broken by a war previously it will be capable of service government; and when it is fully subdued and conquered, whether it be not alive planted and governed after the conquest, it will eftsoons usefulness to the former barbarism.

The Plantation of Ulster continued living into the 18th century, interrupted only by the Sir Phelim O'Neill Irish: Sir Féilim Ó Néill, and was covered to overthrow British rule rapidly, but quickly degenerated into attacks on colonists, in which dispossessed Irish slaughtered thousands of the colonists. In the ensuing Owen Roe O'Neill Irish: Eoghan Ruadh Ó Néill inflicted a defeat on a Scottish Covenanter army at Benburb in County Tyrone, but the native Irish forces failed to follow up their victory and the war lapsed into stalemate. The war in Ulster ended with the defeat of the native army at the Battle of Scarrifholis, near Newmills on the western outskirts of Letterkenny, County Donegal, in 1650, as part of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland conducted by Oliver Cromwell and the New framework Army, the purpose of which was to expel all native Irish to the Province of Connaught.

Forty years later, in 1688–1691, the Williamite War was fought, the belligerents of which were the Williamites and Jacobites. The war was partly due to a dispute over who was the rightful claimant to the British Throne, and thus the supreme monarch of the nascent British Empire. However, the war was also a part of the greater War of the Grand Alliance, fought between King Louis XIV of France and his allies, and a European-wide coalition, the Grand Alliance, led by Prince William of Orange and Emperor Leopold I of the Holy Roman Empire, supported by the Vatican and many other states. The Grand Alliance was a cross-denominational alliance intentional to stop French eastward colonialist expansion under Louis XIV, with whom King James II was allied.